2014 mapmaking (part 6)

This is the 6th post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.

“Perhaps due to lack of significant change in my [cassette] walkman-cum-CD-walkman-cum-mp3 player-cum Ipod, it still often occurs that music specific to certain haunts replays itself when I return to the haunts. Looking towards the landscape break [between] the rolling hills of Barnsley and the barren-Pennine hills, I remember how this landscape break functioned as an analogy for a break off occurring in my life, when I frequented this route, often by pushbike, aged 18. The song evoking this powerful feeling of [seemingly uncalled-for] loss is ‘Politik’ by Coldplay (one of the only tracks I hold dear by a band I largely associate as the main audio backdrop to [the] socially-cleansed ‘Bland Britain’ [that the 2000’s became].) Looking up at the green hills towards the (seemingly) always broody enclosure of Penistone, the song gives me a gut-wrenching feeling that I feel powerless to finally put to bed now. It is the break off of one reality to the general reality I occupy now. I see my 18 year old self with a sense of innocence, not really understanding where exactly he was leading his thoughts to the rest of this young adulthood.”

“Looking over to Burngreave’s cluster of row-rise flats that cover the sharp, hilly, incline. Remember being surprised to find out that there was once a large estate [Woodside], including tower blocks, just over the other side of this small hill, but is now long-gone. Although the flats may have fallen into decline, as a South Yorkshire resident I get a sense of deep injustice over the de-metropolising and de-futurising of Sheffield, inflicted on it from Thatcher onwards.”

“Young man, clearly homeless, sits outside the Division Street Sainsbury’s [store], on an evening where the temperature has noticeably dropped. Perhaps because I’m a little more beaten by things today, I haven’t got my ‘rat-race’ [need-to-get-things-done] mentality’ on, I feel genuine empathy for him – something I think we [generally] do our utmost to avoid [doing]. But I can’t avoid [doing so] because he has a relatively similar physical appearance to me, which makes the prospect of homelessness far more imaginable.”

30 October 2014

“Hill feels harder to climb today. Possibly due to the many headlights from cars, continuously blinding me and making it feel like a sensory bombardment. Look back over the M1 motorway – just a constant flow of lights, like little digits moving up to make one big picture. This predicament is not freedom .”

“Young [woman] stands in the middle of the generally depopulated (post 6pm) town centre with a charity bucket – the name of which I am unsure. I hear a male voice speaking to her, as a walk past [and onwards], in a strong working class London accent, saying “your security is also my priority, darling”. Something just doesn’t look right about it [all]. It seems like heresy to suggest that a charity [may be] dodgy, but it certainly strikes me as being this way. After all, surely in an age where everybody [is having to] scramble for every last penny. surely someone’s going to try it?”

31 October and 1 November 2014

“Initially strange sight as we pass the Vets for Pets [business] on Wilthorpe Road. One of those times when what you think is a group of people playing about, turns out to be a couple of teenage males taunting a lone individual. This individual looks in a state, to say the least; wrecked by life, to be appropriate. Hooded and hunched, he swings his shopping bags in a furious yet drunken manner at these two teenage males, who are clearly taking delight in mocking this ‘weaker’ subject. It’s ‘lols’ all round for them. This incident brings us onto the awfulness of bullying in general. It also brings us onto the issue of Jeremy Clarkson, a popular figure who applauds [the] ridicule of those [he deems] ‘weaker’ than him.”

3 November 2014

“Deep black heaps of coal lay in large car-park at The Old Post Office pub (next to motorway junction). The coal is being loaded onto large lorries. I think about how in our so-called ‘post-industrial’ times, we easily forget [due to its disappearance – at least in raw form – from our immediate horizons] that such [resources] still fuel the world we inhabit.”

” Windy lane next to ‘traditional’ Yorkshire scenes. I know that part of the reason I walk so fast is to, at least momentarily, con myself over my growing sense of immobility.”

“After miles of walking through clearly definable landscape I am finally upon an interspace container – a city to city train. Feel at ease, don’t even care if I look worn and ragged to the commuters that surround. I’ve exhausted the need for worry, care – just a human drone, in awe of the bright lights in the train as I stare up. And why shouldn’t I be? Sometimes I [crave] to be in these interspaces.”

“As soon as I get into the city I notice individuals carrying rucksacks, who [certainly look to be] ‘of no fixed-abode’. You can’t hide it [no matter how hard you try]. [because] the smartly-dressed office workers who pass them by are visibly not condemned to where those clothes all the time. [Such a predicament clings to you].”

“Walking down Bond Street. Odd layout. Hoardings, barring entrance to something, and bakeries and a [small] bus station that look ill-placed now that the 9-5 stage of Leeds day is over. Something feels missing in a much wider sense though; a real sense of an absence of something.”

About John Ledger

A visual Artist, eternal meanderer and obsessive self-reflector by nature, who can’t help but try to interpret everything from within the tide of society. His works predominantly take the form of large scale ballpoint pen landscape drawings and map-making as social/psychological note-making. They are slowly-accumulating responses to crises inflicted upon the self in the perplexing, fearful, empty, and often personality-erasing human world.